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We learn a lot in this novel about the pressures and rewards (not so many of the latter) of living in a traditional extended but close-knit Indian family of shopkeepers: brothers and their families living in the same house; the submissiveness of women to their mothers-in-law even when these show their resentment of their daughters-in-law; the pressures on wives to produce children - boys for preference - and the disgrace if they fail to do so; the pressure for arranged marriages, and for the eldest daughter to be married before a younger brother; the importance of caste, social ranking, education, skin colour and horoscopes within the marriage market; even young girls having to fast one day a year for their future husbands; the pressure to adopt the children of deceased relatives; the demands of the family shop on all the members of the family and the ethos of unremitting hard work by the men to make the shop prosper; the women, in this novel at any rate, spending the energies left over from cooking and housework in being jealous of each other, and, being particularly status-conscious, in nagging their husbands who, in this novel, are softer than their wives.

The respected, benign and conservative patriarch maintains some kind of unity in the family, but when he dies, the tensions multiply. The patriarch had stood in the way of modernization. The shop had sold nothing but saris. After his death, the second generation modernize the shop, expand into ready-made clothes, and then pull down the old house in which they have been living and build a more modern one - at the cost of, among other things, bribing the local authorities and the police. With great difficulty, the sons push out the nephew who was only a sister's son. The men in the third generation are more ambitious still, now branch out into bridal dresses and all the accoutrements needed for those lavishly described Indian weddings. A new daughter-in-law does not show the traditional submission to the mother-in-law, and keeps herself and her husband separate from the communal living that had been the norm before. In the third generation also a young girl falls `unsuitably' in love and suffers heart-break under the still conservative social restraints of her family.

It is basically a sad book, with none of the characters being really happy and all being caught up in family tensions. Most unhappy of all are the two principal characters - Sona of the second generation and Nisha of the third: Sona because the world around her is changing too fast for her; Nisha because it is not changing fast enough and she is still trapped. We are drawn deeply into this family's story, which is very well told, with what I found a moving ending. The author's style is straightforward, even if it is peppered with many Indian words the English reader will not know; their rough meaning, however, can generally be guessed. Her tone is compassionate rather than censorious, though there is much to be censorious about.

an eye opener to the complex balancing act of life in a multi-generational Indian home.
good: a great insight into a life style, honor and political system among an expanded family.
not so good: slow plot, life for multiple character are described as limited to the power struggle within the extended family - is it really so?